Rocco Labellarte is Head of Technology and Change Delivery at Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, and is appearing on the Industry Leaders Panel at Next Generation Infrastructure on 23 September in London, alongside the CTO of Framestore, and Heads of Technology from Mercedes F1 and Government Digital Service. We caught up with Rocco to chat about his experience and projects, as well as his expectations from the conference. Here’s what he had to say:

Rocco Labellarte: I am discussing Migrating to next generation infrastructure – Mountain or molehill? at NGI 2014. I believe it is an opportunity to underline the essential move toward IT being all about enabling business outcomes. IT becomes the toolbox; how businesses use that toolbox to achieve their desired outcomes becomes the more fundamental question.

Ovum: What are some of the challenges of your job?

RL: The 3P’s: people, politics and people! Joking apart, being able to manage multiple stakeholder groups, communicate really well and bridge the language divide between what technology can deliver and what people want, makes up 70% of my job. It is a challenge, the rules are what they are, with each employer being just a little bit unique, and you have to adopt the frame of mind that “these are the rules you are going to have to play by, so get used to it”, otherwise you will find yourself stressed out in next to no time.

Ovum: What skills and qualities would you most value in your successor?

RL: The ability to be concise, energetic and with a sense of humour. Knowing what they are talking about helps too. A broad understanding of technology, a sound grasp of business essentials, a delivery mentality and the ability to work with people at all levels of the organisation. If you convince people you know what you’re saying and you get them on board then they are more likely to trust you to just get on and deliver.

Ovum: What one thing would you implement tomorrow if you knew you were guaranteed to succeed?

RL: A time machine. Hindsight is a fabulous gift we’ve all been given; the trouble is we always get after the event. It is what translates to experience and learning for the next time. If we had a time machine, we’d be able to learn from our mistakes, go back in time and avoid them. That would be fun.

You can view all of the topics to be discussed at Next Generation Infrastructure on the event agenda, and you can discuss these topics and more with Rocco, and all our speakers, by registering today (enterprise end-users can claim a complimentary pass).

When it comes to making customer-facing systems faster, easier to use and more attractive, there’s always budget available. That’s because a bad customer experience means lost sales and lost revenues – anathema for the senior management team.

But while the user experience for customer-facing apps is constantly under scrutiny, many businesses still overlook the high costs of corporate systems that fail to provide a good user experience.

There’s the cost, for example, of answering a customer query too slowly and losing their business to a competitor. The cost of making a critical decision based on outdated or incomplete information. Or, with information held in multiple systems, the cost of tracking an order or pulling together a report , which – time after time – is needlessly high.

To maximize productivity and lower operating costs, your people need to be able to access the information they need easily, and complete common tasks much more quickly. The question is how.

It’s often assumed that improving the user experience of corporate systems is not an option – neither in budget terms, nor in the sheer practicality of tweaking those complex interfaces and processes to make a user’s life easier.

At Saggezza, we disagree. We believe that it’s not only possible to transform the experience of working with corporate systems, but commercially imperative.

Consider this: a retailer was spending hours tracking and resolving logistics issues. Users had to wrestle with multiple systems to pinpoint problems such as short deliveries. It took even longer to rectify them. The result: frustrated customers, frustrated users.

We worked with the retailer to transform the experience, bringing together information in disparate systems into a single intuitive interface. The result: time savings for users, greater insight into deliveries, and far happier customers. You can read about this case study in our free guide to experience-centric IT, “Logistics Rewritten by Saggezza.”

It’s no small task. It requires a combination of the interactive design techniques of the new media world, with a deep understanding business processes and enterprise applications. But when they come together, it’s a potent combination.

Ian Whiting is the Director of Interactive Services at Saggezza. He brings over 10 years of experience working in the interactive design and development space. He leads a team of interactive designers, business analysts and developers who focus on user experience optimization, interactive design, and lean user-driven development. He oversees the building of custom web applications and mobility solutions, yielding business and process transformation for Saggezza enterprise clients.

Ian graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Graphics Technology from Purdue University.”